There is a particular cruelty in realizing you chose wrong. Not catastrophically, not obviously, but quietly — in the way a split-second decision at a concert can redirect an entire life. That is the breathtaking premise at the heart of The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez, the second book in her Say You’ll Remember Me series, and it delivers the kind of slow-burn romance that keeps you staring at the ceiling long after the last page.
The first book, Say You’ll Remember Me, set the stage for this world and its characters. But The Night We Met functions as a complete story in its own right — anchored in the quiet, devastating space between two people who feel everything and say almost nothing.
The Setup: One Ride. Two Men. A Year of Consequences.
Larissa Soto is broke, resourceful, brilliant in the way people who have always had to figure things out tend to be, and perpetually outrunning disaster. When we meet her, she is juggling seven jobs, supporting her mother through surgery, and carrying $30,000 worth of fraudulent debt courtesy of her criminal father. She is also dating Mike — charming, magnetic, protective Mike — who she chose over his quieter, more guarded best friend at a concert the night they all met. She chose Mike because he smiled at her. Because Chris looked tired and impatient, and she had enough tired people in her life.
What she could not have known is that Chris Wright had wanted to drive her home too.
The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez begins not with a romance but with a favor: Chris, dragged out of bed at five in the morning by Mike’s hangover, drives Larissa and her mother to the hospital. What unfolds at a bakery across the street — bread rated on a handwritten scoreboard, pumpernickel crowned as a ten out of ten, two strangers discovering they are the only people alive who have read the same obscure 1986 science-fiction novel — is something Jimenez handles with the delicacy of someone who understands that falling for someone is rarely loud. It is almost always bread and a ballpoint pen.
The Relationship at the Core
A Slow Burn That Actually Burns
What makes The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez sing is that it earns every ounce of its tension. This is not manufactured angst. The obstacle between Chris and Larissa is not a misunderstanding or a villain; it is loyalty, and decency, and a man Chris loves like a brother. He will not cross that line. He will buy an EpiPen out of pocket for Larissa’s severe nut allergy. And he will clear six inches of snow off her car at four in the morning and say nothing. He will gently orchestrate small kindnesses she assumes are from Mike, because all he wants is for her to be happy — even if that happiness belongs to someone else.
This is the architecture of the book: a man quietly falling apart and a woman slowly realizing something is off-center. Their friendship deepens through shared custody of a feral, beloved rescue Yorkie named Woofarine — a creature of absolute chaos and total devotion who serves as their most legitimate reason to keep showing up in each other’s lives. Every doorstep conversation that stretches twenty minutes past its intention, every book they debate with the ferocity of people who don’t have anyone else to argue with, every disaster they stumble into together — eleven-mile hike gone wrong, snake on the trail, deer encounter at a Toilet King billboard at one in the morning — is Jimenez stacking wood before the fire takes.
What Works Brilliantly
The dual POV is handled with exceptional precision. Chris’s perspective is restrained almost to the point of aching; Larissa’s is sharper, funnier, and eventually haunted by her own growing awareness.
Jimenez writes working-class financial stress with specificity and dignity. Larissa’s side hustles — plasma donation, snackle boxes, mystery shopping, a pig in a hot tub — are not quirky accessories. They are a portrait of a woman in survival mode who has never once stopped running.
The secondary characters breathe. Lexi, Larissa’s best friend, is hilariously unfiltered and occasionally right. Nancy, Larissa’s mother, is a cautionary tale in a housecoat who somehow manages to be lovable. Mike himself is drawn with enough complexity that you understand why Larissa stayed as long as she did, even as you watch him unravel.
The anaphylaxis scene and its aftermath — the true crisis point of the novel — is handled with terrifying competence. When it arrives, it recontextualizes every small precaution Chris has quietly taken, and Jimenez makes you feel both the relief and the grief of it simultaneously.
Where the Book Asks You to Be Patient
The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez is not without friction. Readers hoping for a traditional romantic payoff may find the ending both emotionally satisfying and structurally open-ended. The book is less concerned with resolution than with the precise, honest moment before it — the moment when two people finally stop lying to themselves, even if they cannot yet act on the truth. For some, this will feel earned and courageous. For others, it will sting.
Mike’s arc, too, asks for nuance rather than a clean verdict. His alcoholism is not sensationalized, but it is also not fully explored. The book gestures at the roots of it — a derailed athletic career, depression, insecurity — without fully settling his story. Given how central he is to the emotional machinery of the novel, a little more attention to his interior life would have made the final rupture land with even greater weight.
That said, these are not dealbreakers. They are the kind of choices a writer makes when she trusts her readers enough to sit with something incomplete.
The Abby Jimenez Signature
Jimenez fans will recognize her voice immediately in The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez — the conversational warmth, the dry observational humor, the way she drops grief and tenderness into scenes that are ostensibly about soup or a dead snake on a hiking trail. She wrote about a pharmacist’s inner life in previous books like Yours Truly and The Situationship, and her comfort with emotionally guarded men who love in the most exhaustingly devoted ways is on full display here. Chris Wright may be the most quietly heroic character she has written.
If you loved Just for the Summer, Part of Your World, or the original Say You’ll Remember Me, you will find yourself at home here, perhaps a little wrecked, but home.
If This Book Found You at the Right Moment
For readers who want more in this vein:
People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry — same slow burn, same heartbreak of timing
Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter — love triangles done with real emotional stakes
It Ends With Us / It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover — for the complicated relationship arcs
Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating by Christina Lauren — friends-first chemistry with generous humor
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren — for the banter and the buried feelings
Beach Read by Emily Henry — for the writer’s melancholy and unexpected connection
Final Thought
The Night We Met by Abby Jimenez is, at its core, a book about the roads not taken — and the grace it requires to accept that some things cannot be undone, only gently moved past. It is also about a very small, very unhinged Yorkie who kills things and brings them as gifts, and somehow this is not a contradiction. Jimenez has written something rare: a romance where the most romantic act in the entire story is a man silently checking an expiration date on an EpiPen.
If that sentence makes you feel something, this book was written for you.